Antonin Artaud

Artaud was a french theatre practioner, director, actor and playwright. He was born on 4th September 1896  and died 4th March 1948. He suffered with meningitis throughout his childhood, and was given medication. Into his adult years he became drug dependent, and known to be addicted to opium. He became addicted to the substance when he was using it to treat his mental illness, as he suffered often from clinical depression. Despite this, he was one of the pioneers of what we might call today, experimental theatre.

He had a belief that inside every human was a dark side. The side which secretly thought about being a murderer or a rapist. He felt by showing people onstage doing this that it would stop them from doing it themselves in wider society. I think this is the idea that if you see a situation played out and all the possible consequences of your actions whether them good or bad may often stop you from doing the thing you wanted to or planned to do. 

One exercise he would do with his companies would be called 'impossible tasks'. We did this today and it was where we all wrote an impossible task to be done within the room, on a piece of paper then mixed them up and got given a different one. My one was to eat the ceiling. We were told to push ourselves as much as possible. We had to go as far as the boundaries of the room and being in a school would allow. I managed to get up onto a cabinet, touching the ceiling and a section of the ceiling plaster fell into my hand. This is where I found my limit. The idea of actually eating it seemed like a step to far. However, if I was to push myself fully that would have been the next level to go to.

He believed that theatre should be as effective as possible. He did not want to merely entertain but make the audience think and effect their views. In this sense his aims were similar to that of Brecht.  One of his famous sayings about the purpose of theatre was 'not to entertain, nor to instruct - to affect'. His ideas were often to assault the audience. Which seems like a harsh word. What I think is meant by this is that you do not show them something that will distract them from their lives and make them happy, but something that demonstrates this darker side of people he believed in, and allows the audience to question it. This means they may start to question themselves and this side of them, or of people they know. Often during Artaud's time when his work was shown people would just leave the theatre midway through performance. This was a sign of his time and how the theatre was much more 'in your face' then people were used to then.